Tag: dating on a budget

So, I recently had the pleasure of seeing someone I met online a few more times. She’s psych major at a local university and for whatever reason, doesn’t agree with conspiracy theorists on the subject of 9-11. She thinks it’s “too farfetched”.

We met on Okcupid and normally I use tinder for casual dating but Okcupid seemed like a safe bet. She hadn’t answered her personality questions so I had to dig deep when asking her about herself. “So what do you do for fun?” I asked. Trying to sound cool, as I’d posted all of my pics wearing sunglasses and hypothetically in “wealthy looking” establishments.

“I’m super busy with school right now, but I usually just sit in bed watching crime dramas”

“crime dramas” I thought, what a concept. I sort of grew up in a crime drama, if you’ll believe it. My father was a defense attorney for the better half of his life, and when I was young he used to take me on road trips up the coast of California telling me all about his knucklehead clients.

“meth is the devil’s drug” he would say.

Now, contrary to my facial appearance, I never got the chance to do meth. If my father’s job accomplished anything, it kept me off meth.

So, one of benefits of okcupid is that it combs for many personal details. It’s basically a dating background check in an app. I love this feature because it allows me to poke and prod about anything that they leave up for grabs. So, under the drugs category, she’d put never.

I can’t trust anyone who puts ‘never’ under anything. They are either lying, or just very boring. But, I digress; we were talking about “crime dramas”. Oh yes, okay.

So, I’d asked her if she’d seen The Killing, which happens to be one of my sister’s favorite series. She replied no, that she watched a show that I’d never heard of.

In point of face, it didn’t really matter what she said, because I was just trying to get laid. She responded that she was usually busy during the week but liked to go out on weekends. I said, okay, that sounds good.

I always say, sounds good, but I never mean it. I don’t make enough salary to say ‘that sounds good’.

So, there I was, some horny twenty something, a blaring cliche, typing dribble into a chatroom. And there she was, stone faced, and dark skinned. And she smelled of roses. Something about her was overdone. I couldn’t tell if it was her make-up, or the color of her eyebrows. It might’ve been the dullness of her smile. Or the perfect alignment of her unstained teeth. Whatever it was, was not doing it for me. But I took her out anyway.

So, late one afternoon I came by her apartment complex in midtown and took her for a ride to La Mesa where we waltzed through guitar center. I told her I needed to pick up a few things there, and she seemed interested. We stopped by the drum shop for a brief second and I jammed out some beats. I think she was impressed.

I kind wanted to keep it short and sweet, so I took her to Baskin Robbins and bought us both an ice cream cone. I got gold medal ribbon and she got something with the word raspberry in it. I felt like I was 7 years old sitting the park with my friends. It was great.

As the night winded down, she stayed in Baskin Robbins talking about our previous relationships and what we wanted to do with our lives. She told me she wanted to teach college one day. I told her that I wanted to do the same. And right then and there, I felt a rush of adrenaline and had to excuse myself to make a phone call.

I didn’t have to make a call, but I didn’t want to say something totally idiotic because how often do you meet someone that so closely matches your interests. It totally reminded me of that song ‘fake love’ by Drake, because I knew she didn’t love me (we’d only just met), but the way she was telling me about her dreams was like she was trying to show me ‘fake love’.

I walked back in the store and told her that my mom called to tell me that I had to go home and take my whites out of the washer. She obliged, and I dropped her off back at her home. As I stopped the car in front of her house, and could smell the perfume in her autumn brown hair as she stepped out of my car. “bye david, I had a good time”.